Seeking A Good Old Summer Time

Not to whine or anything, but I don't have much by way of memories of the "good old summer time." We didn't have summer on the island where I grew up, just wet season and dry season. That brought a variety of excitement from floods to water rationing; but never summer. No, never summer.

There was that one time when we came "back" to the United States for furlough (how does a kid go back to a place they never came from to begin with?). From looking at the pictures in the photo albums I conclude that it was summer. Seems like the four of us plus Grandma and her housekeeper Emmy all crammed into a big brown-gold car of some forgettable American brand, a car we bought in Florida and sold when we got to California. I vaguely remember sitting in that car hour upon hour, day after day. It was hot, and I remember no air conditioning in the vehicle. We paused only to tour national parks and to visit with our parents' friends, relatives or acquaintances who could have been Argentinians, for all we knew of them or their unfamiliar context. 

Yep, it was a summer furlough. But for me there was never that Chris-Rice-clumsy-fly kind of summer where you spend long days wading in the creek, lying in the hammock reading a book, camping in the mountains with your parents, or flying kites on a Pacific Ocean beach. None of that stuff of getting to know your cousins as well as if they were your own siblings and having it last year after year, no little summer romances with the boy down the street, no summer sandwiches topped by fresh, flavorful hot tomatoes straight off the vines, no Fourth of July parades or trips to the county fair.

Heaven is not the only destination for which you can have nostalgia, having never experienced it.

This is where I confess to my faithful readers that I have a secret Sunset-fed dream/dilemma, one that I keep working on but have not yet solved: to experience a "good old summer time" in my own lifetime. 

In my ideal scenario my husband and I rent out our house to summer grad students. We buy a gently-used Airstream trailer and a truck (with who-knows-what money), and head out across the continent for the summer. A long summer. We'll have none of that little 2-month gasp for air that the K-12 teachers must call "summer" while they are planning for the coming year and attending professional development. This is a summer like we haven't had in thirty-ahem years. A real summertime summer.

So we hook up our sweet Airstream to the truck and take off with no plan. Just point our noses in a direction and go. Our trailer's loaded with some basics and our electronics (phone, laptop, iPad). Every day we eat healthfully of produce picked up during a recent stop at a farmers' market, go for a hike of at least 5 miles, take time to write, get acquainted with at least one new person, read out loud to each other from a good book, and learn about the local color of wherever-we-are. And every so often we park where we can wake up to one of those heart-stopping views, somewhere in the grandeurs of north America. Oh, that would be joy! 

Can you please tell me how I can get ahold of a good old summertime? For reals?

Only Yesterday

After long enough of being alone

Everyone must face their share of loneliness

In my own time nobody knew the pain I was goin' through

And waitin' was all my heart could do

Hope was all I had until you came...

(from "Only Yesterday" by Karen and Richard Carpenter)

The incredibly smooth, contralto notes of Karen Carpenter's first line still make my heart melt, every time.

The song was released in 1975 on the album "Horizon," when I was 13 years old. It's the soundtrack of my teen years. Don't we all get our hearts nailed down to the popular music from that phase of our development? I certainly did.

Some people get all mushy about a hearing particular song that accompanies their memories of falling in love with their dearly beloved. I do, too. But in terms of the power to recreate clear memories right down to the details of one's sensory memory, the soundtrack of falling in love with my husband still can't compare to the songs of those years when I was 14, 15, and 16 years old (Sorry, Husband).

I can still feel the velvety softness of my gold bedspread, remember the coolness and hear the hum of the air conditioner in the background as I read romance novels into the wee hours of the mornings during my boarding school vacations. I would lie on my bed, tummy down, book on the floor, and devour the stories. I can still feel the pressure over my eyes from my favorite reading posture, looking down toward my book on the bright green carpet, my arm hanging down to turn the pages. I was smart enough to realize that the romance novels all followed a predictable pattern, but that made them no less addictive. My heart was drunk with the vicarious tingle of falling in love, relishing how the main characters' conversations danced around the fact that two people were falling in love but hadn't figured it out yet, feeling the hope seep deep into my heart that someday, someday, this kind of story would be populated with my very own details. And in the background, on the cassette tape recorder, Karen Carpenter sang.

Only yesterday when I was sad and I was lonely,

You showed me the way to leave the past and all its tears behind me.

Tomorrow may be even brighter than today

Since I threw my sadness away

Only yesterday.

(and here the guitar riff takes off, wailing in a way that no music did, in what I usually listened to)

And then there was another one:

Stop! Oh yes, wait a minute Mr. Postman

Wait! Wait Mr. Postman

Around the age of 13 I had read a book written completely as a correspondence between a guy and a girl as they fell in love, and I'd been absolutely fascinated. The Carpenters' punchy Postman song dovetailed with my own dreams of falling in love via letters--never realizing that after several correspondences through my life I would actually fall in love "head first" via e-mails with my husband. There was just something so delicious about a correspondence romance, and the Carpenters fed it delightfully as they tried to waylay the postman.

The heartsick ballads--and there were plenty of those on Karen and Richard Carpenters' albums--were fine, but what I really liked were the songs that told of joy after pain, healing after hurt, giddy happiness on the heels of love being elusive for so long. These provided just the soundtrack to go with my romance novels, in which all things work out so beautifully by the last page. I felt I could imagine exactly what Karen Carpenter meant when she sang,

Happy is the way I'm feelin', and I know it comes from being with you.

All at once my life is changin', and I know it's 'cause I'm fallin' in love

With you!

Fallin' in love with you.

As I reminisce, the songs swirl around my head, all in that wonderful sweet-molasses voice of Karen Carpenter. And I am happy--happy for the music, happy for being able to access the memories, happy for my own love story that was so satisfying that I completely lost my old interest in romance novels. I think I'll go give my husband a big ol' smoocheroo and then download the entire soundtrack of "Horizon" to my playlist. And I'll feel sad for a little while again today that our world has lost Karen Carpenter's beautiful voice.

Book review: "Leadership Pain"

I used to read mostly fiction, being a person who likes hearing and telling stories. No more. It seems like in the past 15 years since I went into administration, my tastes have shifted more and more towards inspiration and self-help.

Leadership Pain by Sam Chand is both self-help and inspiration, if you're going by genres typically used in bookstores. I doubt it will be of much interest to the readership of my blog, but I have to say that this is one of the most practical, rings-true books I've ever read for leaders. 

Chand's basic message is that if you're a leader worth your salt, your job is going to cause you pain. People don't like change. People are not perfect. And when you lead wholly for the sake of the organization's mission, you're going to run up against both of those situations, along with your own painful imperfections. Take that pain, Chand says, and use it for the product that you and God can bring out of it: your own growth and deepening of character. I was already along the path of this realization after leaving my last leadership job, but Chand articulated it more specifically than I had worked through, thus far.

Here are a few quotations from the book to give you a sense of it:

Leadership that doesn’t produce pain is either in a short season of unusual blessing or it isn’t really making a difference. 

We need to make friends with our pain. In a recent op-ed article for the New York Times, columnist David Brooks offered a surprisingly biblical view of the power of pain. He observed that Americans are obsessed with the pursuit of happiness, but they often feel empty, alone, and without meaning. He noted, “People shoot for happiness but feel formed through suffering. . . . Happiness wants you to think about maximizing your benefits. Difficulty and suffering send you on a different course.” Brooks shares this insight: “The right response to this sort of pain is not pleasure. It’s holiness . . . placing the hard experiences in a moral context and trying to redeem something bad by turning it into something sacred.”  

…most people lack at least one and perhaps both of two essential elements: insight and courage. Instead, they tend to become either blame sponges or blame throwers to affix blame quickly and get the conflict over as soon as possible. 

In times of conflict, some people readily accept the responsibility for a problem even if they didn’t do anything (or much) to cause it or prolong it. In their insecurity, they can’t stand living with tension. Their answer is to claim that they’re the ones at fault. They’re sponges, absorbing the blame. On the other side—the blame throwers—are more than happy to come to the same conclusion. They impulsively defend themselves at all costs and point to any target, especially those who willingly and foolishly accept all blame.”  

Pain isn’t an intrusion into the lives of spiritual leaders; it’s an essential element in shaping the leader’s life.” 

If you're looking for a gift for a Christian leader--that is the worldview from which this book is written--I'd highly recommend Leadership Pain. My experience tells me that you'll get a heartfelt "thank you" once they've started it, and yet more thanks once they've finished it.

Advice to an 8th Grader

The picture is of me in the 8th grade, at the tender age of 14. We were newly into 1976, I'd reached my maximum height of five-foot-nine, and I was planning a graduation along with Barbara, my one classmate. I was dreaming of enrolling in school in Singapore where there would be--oh, glory!--an exciting, large student body of 72 students.  Seventy-TWO teenagers like me, most of them American. My body practically vibrated with the imminence of it.

This week Donna has invited the Comeback Bloggers--I'm one of those--to write about what advice we would give to our younger selves.

So I look myself in the face--me at the soft and rounded age of 14, me with the hair that would not straighten even with the aid of hair salon chemicals, me in the lime-green polyester dress and no makeup, me with hope and beneficence shining out of my eyes--and I ask myself, "What would I tell her? Can I boil it down to just one thing? What would have made a difference for good in her life?

I think I would tell her these things:

1. You are sturdy. Your husband will use that word in your first year of marriage to describe you, and you will be startled. But he will be right. Your body is sturdy, your soul is sturdy, and your brain is sturdy. You can depend on all of them, trust them all for a long time to come. No need for second-guessing yourself, holding back for fear of what others will think or whether their reactions will be positive or negative. Don't wait until you are old to wear purple. Be the person you'd like to be, right now, without temerity. You'll survive even better than you think.
2. You can depend on life to teach you humility. You have not yet failed spectacularly, but you will. And although it will hurt, though it will pierce your heart and crack your self-confidence and lay you low and bleeding, it will be good for you. Very good for you. You'll not regret the way failures will shape your character for the better. Failure will will teach you that you have no claim on specialness, that you can be gentle with others, that you need not require perfection of others, that there is always an unseen story, and that you must not judge others so harshly when they fall short. You need to learn that. Someday, perhaps, you will even learn to be gentle with yourself, ...but you won't have learned that yet by the age of 54. Just sayin'.
3. Things are not as they seem. Your family is not what you think it is. But you will survive the years of shock and revelation as you discover the truth and renegotiate relationships, and your connections with each of them will survive ... because you are sturdy. So hang in there when things shatter. Go for help.
4. This sounds trite because everyone says it, but you've got to figure out how to not care what others think of you. This will cause you more psychic anguish than any one thing. It will drive your actions, manipulate your emotions, reduce your effectiveness, limit you in just about every kind of way. STOP it. It really doesn't matter what others think of you. It only matters what they think. There is a difference--the difference between listening to what is important to others and treating it as valuable, and thinking that their thoughts must cause you to surrender your own value, calling, beliefs or intelligence.
5. Explore. Be more curious. Ask why.

I think that's a lot to load onto a soft, rounded, curly-haired 8th grader. Maybe it's good that she went on into life and discovered it for herself. Because I can't go back in time and tell her these things, I think she has lived life with a more enduring sparkle in her eye. I kind of like that.

Whiteness

Illustration from here

I've been at a conference this week on race and ethnicity. To be honest, I came because I'm on the newly formed Diversity and Inclusion Council at my university, and the president of the university was willing to sponsor three of us to go, at the suggestion of the chair of the council. I'm all for diversity, and I think I'm all for inclusion (except, to be honest, for the potential moments when customizing a class for someone who is deaf or blind is going to make a lot of extra work that I'm not familiar with; then I'll do it on principle but be glad when the extra work is over). And I've long prided myself on the way in which my past as a missionary kid and world traveler have prepared me to interact with a variety of cultures. I ought to be a great fit for the D&I Council and for this conference.

Well. That's all happy-happy talk.

But here is where I start entering the minefields, and if I get honest with you and reveal my life and thoughts, I'm going to start to look pretty ugly. Yet, I find I must be honest.

I have landed squarely in a bunch of sessions this week that remind me of my white privilege. They have taught me that I have no clue about a whole lot of racial injustice in this country, partly because I didn't live in this country until after the Civil Rights struggles of the 60's and 70's were over and done. I have had no context this week for golliwogs, little Black Sambos, and the expressions of the descendants of slavery who continue to feel that subjugation and violence stalk them long after the Emancipation Proclamation. And that last puzzlement is partly because, as one of my colleagues of color said to me once, "You don't see the racism in California because it's a whole lot more subtle than it is in the Southeast. But that doesn't mean it isn't there. It's actually more insidious for not being overt where we can all see it."

So this week I've been pondering the fact that I didn't live in the heat of it, I don't see it and I don't think about it.

But that's all excuses. I was aware of the riots after Rodney King and the issues of Ferguson and Trayvon Martin, and other more recent issues which have been referenced this week. I just didn't dig deep and try to understand them. The stuff of daily life has been given higher priority than a pursuit of Understanding.

There have been a number of memorable moments this week, but perhaps the first that rocked my brain was when a young, white, rather frumpy graduate student presenter said yesterday that "White identity and racism would not exist without each other. You are automatically racist when you are benefiting from the privilege that is there." He said, "The deficit of being white is that we have no idea how to engage with race." And I got very, very uncomfortable.

As I said, these are not things I think about. And that damns me, because it is clear to me--once I stop to consider it--that this country is a very racist place. So are other countries, by the way, but my passport and environment are here, and thus I must engage with my own nation's dilemma.

Some personal history by way of context: I have always had privilege. Born as a desperately cute white baby in a country full of brown folk--Thailand--I was coddled, cooed over, admired, touched and stroked, and, as my mom would say, "Carried around on a silk pillow." We had a house that was extremely modest by U.S. standards but nicer and bigger than the houses of my playmates. Because we traveled around the world every three years on our furloughs, I got an after-school education that my local friends never got. Privileged, even if we weren't rich by American standards.

Because of our privileged status, we got whatever we asked for from the folk around us. For example, I remember when we kids decided to build a rocket after we'd learned about them in school. No adult knew what we were up to, but when we asked the Indian gardener for gasoline--our teacher had pointed out that the parts of a rocket were fuel, oxygen, and ignition--he gave us a jar of it, no questions asked. What crazy privilege is that, when kids can ask for gasoline and get it? Fortunately none of us was injured, but that's another story.

We had servants. Two of them, until I was nearly six years old when we dropped back to one. Sure, you can point to the fact that both of my parents were doctors working hard in the mission hospital, and there were no relatives around to provide child care. But the point is, we had a brown-skinned, tall, rangy-framed Indian servant named Cecelia. We paid her the going rate of about US$40 a month. She was there six days a week, living in a small back room of the house with a squat pot for a toilet and no cooking facilities (she could eat what she cooked for us, right?). On the weekends Cecilia went home via a one-hour bus ride to see her mom, way back in a poor walk-in-only village.

As I write this I cringe. Now I see it differently because these days our eyes are more open to social injustices, to the exploitation perpetrated in past eras. Nevertheless, I wish that as Christian missionaries we had all seen things differently, back then.

Then there was school. The missionaries had a one-room school on our hospital compound for their children to attend, staffed with an excellent teacher from the United States. When it was time for high school we went to Singapore where our dorms were carpeted and air-conditioned, we had delicious and abundant meals in the cafeteria, and well-qualified American teachers who planned good field trips and beach days, and sponsored student association and club activities galore. (The dark underbelly of the raison d'être for the school, according to the whispers among us kids, was that missionary parents didn't want their children dating and marrying locals, so the fishbowl was provided for us-all-of-a-kind.) And then there were the expectations and affirmations: we were told constantly by our teachers and guest speakers, "You are the leaders of the church in this coming generation, should the world last that long."  Well of course! We were already de facto leaders by the time we stepped onto that campus at the age of 14.

My friends back on the island attended British-style half-day schools where, if they didn't pass the 8th grade test at a certain level, they would be streamed into vocational schools and never have a chance at their family's dreams for a better life. There was no air conditioning, no special trips, no enrichment activities except for a very lively church youth group life. The beautiful thing is that just about every one of those friends of mine are leaders today, despite not having privilege--doctors, nurses, businesspeople, CEO's who grew up in unheard-of little villages and traveled in to partake in the youth group for one day a week. The deeply disturbing fact is that in getting an education and taking on western and Christian ways of thinking, they no longer fit into their societies of origin, but fit better in the western countries where they now live--the U.S., U.K. and Australia--than they do back in their hometowns.

My white privilege carried me through the cultural transition to the United States at the age of 18. In college I looked American, sounded American, dressed American. My Southeast Asian schoolmates from Singapore were always noticed as foreigners (and yes, they too have done well in life). I'd had the benefit of music lessons, leadership experience, and an excellent education, and these carried me forward, even ahead of other white schoolmates from small town America.

My white privilege provided me with good nutrition and the strength of genes handed down through generations of people who had lived in lands of plenty. It enabled me to grow into a tall woman, and we know from research that leaders as a group are typically taller than the average population.  Additionally I fall reasonably within the society's definitions of beauty--the blond hair of my childhood, the western-style eyelids, the green eyes, the smooth Dutch-milkmaid fair skin. Our society rewards those who more closely approximate its definitions of beauty.

My white privilege connected me, through the leadership of my parents in their work, with significant people (it's who you know as much as what you know, right?). These people gave me opportunities to work, to grow professionally, to take up leadership positions here in the United States even though I hadn't grown up within a social network here. Privilege is part of a cycle: privilege gets you opportunity, and opportunity gives you talents and training that bring you privilege. You acquire a mindset that you can do it, that you are special, that... well, as the guest speakers told me way back in Singapore days, "You'll be the leaders of the church in the future, if Jesus hasn't come by then."

That's powerful medicine.

When institutions in my sphere look for women leaders to help address the problem of the church being a primarily male-led institution, they often view me as a strong candidate, particularly for presidential openings in church related colleges and universities. See? There are reasons that I get privilege, even now. I can be the token woman on a leadership team and it's pretty comfortable for the white men, because I'm white. I only differ in terms of gender; when you're only having to manage one factor of difference, it's more palatable: "Good. She's a leader, put her in there, she'll be effective. Oh, and by the way: she also survives those subtle smack-downs people dish out to women. At least she won't have to worry about race in addition to gender." I know, I'm being sarcastic and "they"--whoever they are--would never express it this baldly. But as I ponder it, I realize just where my white privilege has continued to provide easy access to opportunity.

Back to the statement by the presenter about white privilege and racism feeding each other. I'm still feeling smacked between the eyes. Me? Racist? It's not that I'm beginning to self-hate in order to try to make reparations to the universe for the lack of others' opportunities.  But I realize that I very rarely stop to think about my own privilege. "Race is not shoved in our face on a daily basis," said the presenter yesterday. And when it's not in your face, you forget about it. Brown-skinned people do not have that option. As he pointed out, brown-skinned people have to think about race every single day.

It is that very point--not having to think about race--that leaves me acknowledging a whole dark side of myself, a blind spot a mile wide. What about the person who could lead, but they came from race-related poverty and thus had no access to the kind of great schooling I had? What about the person who could lead, but they are a different color (or accent or cultural way of interacting) and somehow that makes some people feel uncomfortable? What about the short, quiet Asian woman, who is in my opinion just about the most invisible person in our society? Could she not contribute her wisdom and lead, given the chance?

More to the point: have I done enough to give people of color an opportunity when they haven't have the options and open doors that I've had? Not well enough, I'm realizing. Not nearly enough. I could pat myself on the back for hires that I've made through the years that have increased the diversity of my teams, but I'm still the leader, not them. White. Tall. With the right connections, education and an American accent.

I've not done nearly enough. This young white graduate student presenter said yesterday, "Challenging our own whiteness is a work that we have to do for whole entire lives." It irked me that he is so young and already so wise. And so right.

This is only my story and these are my thoughts thus far. I have much to ponder. I suspect the weaknesses and evils of my thinking are evident even in what I have written here, despite the fact that I experience myself as a magnanimous being. I just can't see my hidden flaws; I'll probably always have blinders on, to some degree or other.

I wish I had gotten serious about this work earlier.